Well, I suppose not entirely. I don't think of my participation as being unduly incompetent. Please explain what you mean by your terse rejection to my comment.

Political tags - such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth - are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.Robert A. Heinlein

Well, I suppose not entirely. I don't think of my participation as being unduly incompetent. Please explain what you mean by your terse rejection to my comment.

LOL. Much of the war was fought as any war is, just as competently.

We failed, not because the "entire war was just one big cluster$#@!." We failed because we did not adequately identify positive goals against which to wage winning campaigns. Keeping the other guy from winning is not a sufficient goal.

Call your state legislators and insist they approve the Article V convention of States to propose amendments.

I pledge allegiance to the Constitution as written and understood by this nation's founders, and to the Republic it created, an indivisible union of sovereign States, with liberty and justice for all.

We failed, not because the "entire war was just one big cluster$#@!." We failed because we did not adequately identify positive goals against which to wage winning campaigns. Keeping the other guy from winning is not a sufficient goal.

I was thinking of that very subject this morning. The left gave GW Bush hell for not having an "exit plan" for the Gulf Wars. And of course, dutifully we gave the left hell for that. But in retrospect they were correct. I don't know if it should be called an "exit plan" but there should be some demonstrable goal that would signify success or failure. Especially when we are not defending the homeland but some foreign soil who loss would not severely affect us over time.

This was the case of Vietnam. I can't tell you what our real goal was in Vietnam other then the stated one of "stopping the spread of communism" and avoiding "the domino effect" (which never really happened). Our win or loss in Vietnam is confusing since we don't really know what we were trying to achieve (I don't think it was putting Ho Chi Minh in power over the entire country although over the long run he certainly was a better leader than many we have supported, like Chaing Kai Shek in Taiwan or Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. I remember going into a store in Hong Kong and there was a huge banner of Mao Zedong in the store. Then we went to Taipai and in a store was a huge banner of Chaing on the wall. I wondered what was the difference between these two guys over all. They both were tyrants and ruthless.

BTW, we called Chairman Mao "Mousey Dung"

Political tags - such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth - are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.Robert A. Heinlein

But frankly, I don't much care what Sun Tzu said about it. There are many things you already know that you wait for some authority figure to tell you anyway. I don't understand that, but most people do it to one degree or another.

On the other hand, some drunk in a gutter can tell them that 2+2=4 and they will reject the fact because he's a drunk.

We are constantly told we lost the Vietnam War. Is that actually true or did we simply quit and give the victory to the North Vietnamese. One of the few almost truthful statements Former President Barack Obama stated was the United States did not lose a single battle in Vietnam. In the 10 plus years of the war we "lost" only two battles and those could be considered not loses but strategic withdrawals to save American lives in a battle that weren't high stakes. Furthermore while our loss of over 55,000 American men and women is certainly horrific it pales in comparison to the 1.2 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong loses we inflicted on the enemy.

We "lost" the Vietnam War, not because of inferior troops or equipment but because of politics and the evening news. The enemy had no navy, no air force, no modern military equipment, no manufacturing base to build weapons. We lost because we did not have the will to do what would have been required to win and win easily, a complete laying of waste of North Vietnam, a homeland invasion and treating the NV as a conquered nation. We didn't want to do that so we let 55,000 Americans and at least a half million South Vietnamese die for the cause of Progressive Democrats on our college campuses and our news rooms.

To be honest, we never should have become involved in what was in truth a civil war between the North and the South in Vietnam. But once we did to not go all in was criminal and that rest squarely on the shoulders of the Great Societies, LBJ.

We did lose the war if we're going to use that context. Our motives weren't clean and that's how we go into trouble. Our military did it's job very well, but the scandal is we didn't have to. The scandal is Ho Chi Minh came to us first, but ambassador John Dulles informed Truman that it was a French problem. Being soft on Communism was the political threat that got us in and kept us there in the face of a war that was 20 years old when we arrived and was essentially over in the national population. It was the downfall of our credibility around the world and we've done nothing to make it any better.